1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is an advanced data management method and system, including both an information storage infrastructure and a database development environment, generally relating to relational databases, object oriented databases, and document management systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
The inventive advanced data management method and system are capable of use with relational databases, web site and client server applications, document and knowledge management applications, discrete data storage, and object-oriented databases.
The invention is particularly useful when used with relational databases (RDBMS), such as Oracle8i, for data management and development.
The past three years have seen the emergence of extensible markup language (XML). Extensible markup language describes a class of data objects called XML documents and partially describes the behavior of computer programs which process them. XML is an application profile or restricted form of standard generalized markup language (SGML) (ISO 8879). By construction, XML documents are conforming SGML documents. In other words, XML enables any storage of information into a text file format for example, as a document. XML databases allow discrete storage of such documents.
Lucent Technologies is believed to have patented a database management system using transitive closure solutions using standard SQL, primarily targeted to solve project management issues, i.e., pert charts or directed graph temporal dependencies.
Until now, efforts to create data management systems and software for databases have involved extremely lengthy and costly development cycles for database design, implementation, tuning and maintenance. These problems have been all too typical in the design and specification of schemas for projects.
Similarly, data warehousing projects have involved complex, time-consuming and expensive phases including data cleansing, building a snowflake model or other models, and harvesting reports. The first phase, data cleansing, typically has represented over 80% of the total time required for such data warehousing projects.
What is needed is a data management method and system that will avoid or eliminate the problems of existing systems.